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Sinica Podcast

Margaret Lewis on ethnic profiling in the DOJ's China Initiative

Sinica Podcast

Kaiser Kuo

Culture, China News, Hangzhou, Chinese, International Relations, Chongqing, Beijing, Sichuan, Currentaffairs, China, Politics, Chengdu, Shanghai, Guangzhou, China Economy, News, China Politics, Business, Film, Shenzhen

4.8676 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week on Sinica, Kaiser chats with Margaret (Maggie) Lewis, a professor of law at Seton Hall University, about her work on the U.S. Department of Justice’s “China Initiative.” Launched under former attorney general Jeff Sessions in November 2018, the China Initiative sought to bring criminal cases against perpetrators of industrial espionage benefiting China, but as Maggie argues, it has in fact resulted in discriminatory ethnic profiling and the criminalization of what she calls “China-ness.” Listen to the end to hear Kaiser’s impression of Cookie Monster as a death metal vocalist.

8:24: Viewing China as an existential threat

17:44: Where the framing and implementation of the China Initiative falls short

28:11: Prosecuting “China-ness”

37:38: The impact on American competitiveness

Recommendations:

Maggie: What Do You Do With an Idea?, What Do You Do With a Problem?, and What Do You Do With a Chance?, by Kobi Yamada; also, Beautiful Oops!, by Barney Saltzberg. 

Kaiser: The album Blackwater Park, by the Swedish progressive metal band Opeth.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome to the cynical podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with SUPChina.

0:14.6

Subscribe to SubChina's daily access newsletter to keep on top of all the latest news from China from hundreds of different news sources

0:20.8

or check out all the original writing on the site at suprin China.com. We've got reported stories,

0:26.9

editorials, regular columns, and a growing library of videos and, of course, podcasts. We cover everything

0:33.2

from China's fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression

0:37.3

of Uyghurs and other Muslim people in China's Xinjiang region, to China's ambitious effort

0:41.9

to eliminate poverty.

0:43.5

It's a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the

0:48.3

world.

0:49.2

I'm Kaiser Guo, coming to you from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

0:52.9

The China Initiative is the name given to a push by the Department of Justice to counter threats

0:57.6

initiating in or otherwise beneficial to China, chiefly in the area of industrial espionage.

1:03.3

It formally began in November 2018 under then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but was taken up by Sessions' successor, William Barr,

1:11.5

and continues to this day under Joe Biden's appointee Merrick Garland.

1:15.1

Under its auspices in its first two years, it charged over 60 cases with alleged links to China,

1:21.1

obtaining a handful of guilty pleas, but the total number of cases opened under the banner

1:25.8

of the China Initiative of now numbers in the thousands, with FBI director Christopher Ray claiming late last year that a new case is

1:32.8

being opened on average every 10 hours.

1:35.9

While I don't think there's any serious person who would deny altogether that there are

1:38.8

some bad actors, including some straight-up spies who've purloined American IP for the benefit

1:43.4

of the PRC,

1:48.4

many people here in the United States have been deeply concerned that the China Initiative is straight-up ethnic profiling and have raised serious issues with the way that the DOJ has

...

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